Gene Chizik: From Title to Toast

No one was more heartbroken about the Gene Chizik news than Iowa State fans.

It’s tempting to try to find or draw a parallel, but you shouldn’t. The Southeastern Conference is not like anything else—not like big business, not like politics, not like anything else in college and professional sports. It’s stranger and more particular to itself and, by its own specific morals, probably more meritocratic than the rest of the non-SEC world. In the rest of the world, a coach who led his program to an undefeated season and a national championship would probably not find himself unemployed less than two years later. In the SEC, coach Gene Chizik won that title at Auburn in 2010 and was still fired on Sunday after a 3-9 season. In the short time since, Chizik’s program came apart, was plagued by controversy and—perhaps most importantly—didn’t win the way it had previously. Anywhere else, this would’ve been given a bit more time to play out. In the SEC … well, here we are, and now Gene Chizik has been fired more quickly after winning a national championship than any coach in college football history.

“Less than two years after Chizik hoisted the Waterford crystal football in Glendale, Ariz., and spoke of his affection for the All In Auburn Family, he and his assistants are jobless,” Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples writes. “Back in the good old days, when Gus Malzahn called the plays and Cam Newton ran them, Chizik loved the Family and it loved him right back. But as this season spiraled further out of control and it became apparent Auburn had become the laughingstock of the SEC, members of the Family began to rip the man they defended so staunchly only two years earlier.” This being the SEC, the reckoning was not long in coming.

If Chizik’s firing seems overreactive, it’s worth noting that the team had reportedly been plagued by discipline problems—the kind that occasions NCAA investigations and warrants jail sentences and the kind that lose football games—in recent years. (In a Sunday news conference, Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs declined comment on the NCAA investigation.) “That’s how you go from 14-0 to 3-9 in two seasons, from winning all nine SEC games in 2010 to losing 10 straight games in the conference between 2011 and 2012, including all eight this season,” Kevin Scarbinsky writes in the Birmingham News. “That’s how you spiral from winning the national championship to losing your job in record time. One player at a time. One standard compromised after another.” It’s harsh, and it’s awfully fast. But it’s also college football, and it’s the SEC.

* * *

Ohio State won’t play in the postseason this year, a result of NCAA sanctions levied against the regime of previous coach Jim Tressel. But after beating Michigan on Saturday to cap an unbeaten season in Coach Urban Meyer’s first year at the school, Ohio State fans have reason to be as excited, excitable and extremely demanding as, well, Ohio State fans usually are.

“Ohio State has one of the best coaches in America, a result-oriented, game-changing talent who might be able to do for the Big Ten what confused expansion plans likely won’t—return the league to national relevance,” Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel writes. “If Meyer can walk into the league and roll it like he just did with a team that isn’t great, well, what’s going to happen when he has one that is?”

It’s a question that has a compelling real-time answer with a similarly spotless record in South Bend, Ind., where top-ranked Notre Dame capped its own perfect (so far) season with a characteristically tough win over USC, and so wrapped up a long wander in the wilderness with a likely spot in the BCS championship game. “Notre Dame, facing what appeared this preseason to be a preposterously difficult schedule, earned its championship berth thanks to a formula very familiar to the two teams playing in the SEC title game next weekend,” Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel writes. “The Irish run the ball and they stuff the run—just like every recent SEC national champion.” This is all much easier said than done, naturally. But Notre Dame and Ohio State both continue to serve proof that such turnarounds are possible, even for plucky underdog programs like them.

* * *

The most important thing to know about the budding quarterback controversy in San Francisco is that the 49ers still have an awfully good defense. Former first overall pick Alex Smith has evolved from a quasi-bust to an efficient and effective quarterback in the last two seasons, and erstwhile backup Colin Kaepernick—who led the Niners to a second straight win against the Saints on Sunday—has looked like a star in the making over the past two weeks. Both players look a lot better thanks to the defense backing them up.

* * *

Last year’s UCLA basketball team was one of the NCAA’s hottest messes, riven by scandal and a sludgy, stodgy presence on the court. This year’s UCLA team, powered by a highly touted recruiting class and ace freshman playmaker Shabazz Muhammad, was supposed to mark a turnaround for the program. That may still happen, but when the Bruins blew an 18-point second half lead, at home, against Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on Sunday night, the whole clumsy spectacle—right down to a late-game brain-cramp by sophomore Norman Powell, which handed Cal Poly two game-sealing free throws—looked eerily familiar.

There are extenuating circumstances, of course, from Cal Poly’s strange slowed-down offense to the announcement, before the game, that junior guard Tyler Lamb was transferring. After the game, Bruins coach Ben Howland acknowledged his team’s lack of focus. “[But] it was a lack of nearly everything that broke UCLA down in the final ten minutes, sending the Bruins reeling with only tougher competition ahead,” the Orange County Register’s Ryan Kartje writes. “It was nothing Muhammad had ever imagined when he signed to play in Westwood.” It’s early yet, of course. But it’s not good.

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Comments (5 of 7)

Iowa State made a much better deal when Chizik left Ames. We got Paul Rhodes from Auburn and rid of Chizik. In Rhodes time at ISU he has managed to take teams to bowl games more frequently than Chizik ever did. Never really understood Auburn's logic in hiring him. His championship year was really a reflection on his predecessor and not him.

3:50 pm November 26, 2012

Charles Barkley wrote:

I wonder what he is saying thinking right now.

3:05 pm November 26, 2012

WarEagle83 wrote:

Apparently, Mr. Chizik is a lousy leader suffering from an overabundance of avarice and pride, especially the unfounded variety. In his book about himself these pronounced personal qualities are demonstrated. Other examples of his leadership ineptitude include his ability to surround himself with profound incompetence as evidenced by his hiring of a recruiting coordinator and assistant head coach, both of whom are complete losers. One is compelled to conclude that his choices were rooted in an insatiable desire to appear more intelligent than anyone else on the staff requiring him to dig so deeply. Why else would he pay >$500K/year for a chest-bumping towel twirler and an RC who cannot recruit without drawing an investigation from the NCAA?

2:11 pm November 26, 2012

Anonymous wrote:

"Gene Chizik: From Title to Toast" --- Toast what? Toast with $208,334 a month for 36 months!

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